“The story we have together”: Written and Oral Storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Abstract

This thesis explores the tension between written and oral storytelling in Juan José Saer’s The Witness, a novel about the narrator’s ten-year stay amongst a group of Indians in the 16th century, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel that recounts Tayo’s recovery from injuries sustained during World War II and his disillusionment with his Pueblo and white ancestry. While each text prioritizes one medium or the other, they also manage to surmount the difficulties inherent in both kinds of texts. Issues of written and oral texts, Western and Native American conceptions of authorship, and language itself are discussed in relation to Plato, Derrida, Butler, and Silko’s other work. An examination of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” unifies the themes from both novels to argue that the limitations of written and oral texts can be surpassed and that we must salvage language, even if our system of semiotics is imperfect. Our human need for connection is so vital that the difficulties posed by medium and language may be overcome.